Dear Folks, It’s Sunday morning. As I’ve done every other morning this week, I turned on the radio the minute I woke up and cursed at the state of the world. Today an archeologist is talking about the endangered ancient sites in Iraq, and people are praising the Israelis for staying out of the war, and the first Purple Heart has been awarded to an injured medic, and the Iraqis are saying they have shot down 150 planes, while we claim to have lost 10.
I know everyone has been undergoing his or her own private sequence of emotions this terrible week, but I think mine have been pretty typical for this liberal New England valley. I started with denial and disbelief. Surely the world couldn’t be stupid enough to go to war. All Saturday a week ago I listened with mounting anger to Congress reasoning itself into stupidity. I was cleaning out the pantry as I listened — a good accompaniment to anger. I scrubbed and sorted and threw stuff out and mumbled retorts to the political rhetoric. The more votes were cast for war, the harder I scrubbed and the more stuff I threw out.
It helped that we were having a gorgeous snowstorm that day. We always feel energetic and cheery during a classic snow, and this was the first good one we’ve seen this year. The cardinals, with an unerring sense of drama, hang out at the feeder on snow days — I like to think they know how spectacular their red feathers are against a white background, though I guess they’re really just loading up against bad weather. Anyway, I watched the birds and fired up the woodstoves and made veggie-barley soup and sunflower-millet bread and listened to the gathering of war.
Sunday the sun shone and the snow was perfect for skiing. Who could think about the Middle East? Basil and I went out and broke ski trails around the Whybrow’s pastures. It was hard work; the snow was thigh deep. Then we unwound by schussing along the trail Karel and Stephanie had made through the woods. After I came in, Basil went out again with Karel and Stephanie to try out my trails. By evening the poor dog collapsed by the stove and literally couldn’t pull himself back up. I had a few cricks myself in some thigh muscles I hadn’t even known I had. It was a glorious day, and there was still time to hope that Saddam would decide to pull out.
Monday and Tuesday were days of plummeting spirits. Saddam wasn’t going to pull out, Bush wasn’t going to open his negotiating position even an inch. I felt bruised and invalidated. I felt that all the thinking and writing and praying of my lifetime and the lifetimes of so many others, all the examples of Gandhis and Martin Luther Kings, all the slow progress of the forces of love against the forces of violence — all that was lost. I don’t often get into a really hopeless, helpless mood, one that questions the whole path to which I have dedicated my life, but when I do, I am not a pleasant person to be around. I try to lie low at such times and keep my dark cloud away from other people. The trouble was, during those days a lot of other people had dark clouds too, for the same reason. It was an awful time. Even more horrible than the thought of war to me is the thought that all the people who oppose war, starting with me, would just give up.
Wednesday the 16th was a quiet, breathless, gray day of pure dread, made worse by a sleet storm that ruined all the snow. I went to a Land Trust Board meeting at four, came home at six with the car radio still reporting no news. At seven we were sitting down to dinner when Don came in and said, “It’s started.”
Like everyone else, we spent the evening glued to the television set watching news teams try to guess what was happening. (We only get two stations here, PBS and NBC, so we mainly watched Tom Brokaw make up drama out of rumors.) As small children do, Heather picked up our mood without understanding what caused it, and through her we could see ourselves. She was wired, excited, restless, powered by a surge of adrenalin. I was astonished to see my mood lift so fast — maybe because it could go no lower, maybe because the waiting was over at last, maybe because there’s a part of me I don’t want to recognize that likes to punch bullies in the nose.
The next day’s emotions were the hardest to hold all together, because they were so contradictory. With the rest of the nation I was elated with the apparent good news about the air strikes. With Israel I was scared, wondering when and how Saddam would retaliate. My strongest feeling was one I didn’t dare say out loud. It was both a hope and a fear that the military success would end the war quickly. The hope was that so many lives could then be spared. The fear was that a brilliant, quick, neat victory would enshrine the glory of military technology and commit this nation to decades more of playing superpower. It’s not easy to hope the military succeeds and does not succeed at the same time, especially when you know that not succeeding means a protracted, bloody war. But all that was in me, and most of it was too controversial to let out.
It was impossible to have a regular class on that first day of war.
I guess I haven’t told you that I’m teaching again for the first time in two years. While “Race to Save the Planet” was in preparation, I was earning enough from the combination of WGBH and John Wiley and the column to be able to work full time on writing and TV consulting. That time is now over and I have to earn an honest living again. I’ll be giving one or two courses a year at Dartmouth. This term (January through March) I’m teaching environmental journalism to 17 senior concentrators in environmental studies.
I’m doing it with mixed feelings — mixed feelings seems to be my theme this month. Adding classes and paper-grading to my schedule pushes me into a level of overburden I swore I would never again permit. Of course I’m keeping up the column, and work for Balaton, and the book, and the farm (though farm work drops off quite a bit in winter). The column gets done no matter what, but the book and the Balaton work suffer. I resent and resist that fact and alternate between bouts of overwork and times of letting go and mourning what I’m not getting done.
On the other hand, it’s a relief to have regular paychecks again. And it’s wonderful to be teaching. I had forgotten how wonderful. I had forgotten why, when I was teaching full time, I never got anything else done. That’s because I have this bad habit of falling instantly in love with my students.
They are just so beautiful. On the first day of the term we went around the room and they told me why they were there and what they wanted from the course. By the time they were done I was restraining tears. They are so earnest, so talented, so innocent, so full of good humor, so brave and yet fearful, so eager to save the world. Each one is so individual and precious. I say constant prayers that I may be worthy of them and that I may find the right ways to encourage and inspire them, especially since I have a fundamental problem with the premise of this course. I don’t believe anyone can teach anyone else to write. The best I can do, I think, is to MAKE them write and write and write and give them all the honest feedback I can, and keep pointing to the place inside each of them from which writing comes.
The course is at the professional level, and they will get a better grade if they can manage to get something they write accepted in a regular publication (not a student publication, for which many of them write already). I had laid out a whole series of exercises for them: letter to the editor, straight news report, science feature story, interview, op-ed piece, major magazine piece. Then in the second week of class war broke out. I scuttled the schedule immediately (teaching them a lesson, I guess, about the importance of flexibility and timeliness in journalism). I assigned them to cover the reaction of the College to war. They came in with poignant reports of vigils and rallies, of tense meetings with draft counselors, of late-night conversations in dorms. Their reports were their ways of working out their own emotions — as my columns were my ways of working out mine.
So they and I are going to play the rest of the term by ear. God grant me the wisdom to serve them well. And thank you, God, for this relief from the chronic isolation of the writer, this opportunity to bring fresh voices into my inner conversation about the joys and frustrations of writing. And help me, God, to get the work done, somehow.
The old crack about war being a way of getting the nation’s mind off domestic problems is true, but it works only a little and only for awhile. Now, just four days into war, everyone in this house is bored with it, Tom Brokaw is no longer broadcasting around the clock, and we remember again that this Valley is in depression. Banks are failing all around us, and Don has been laid off from his painting job. Sylvia is making some money housecleaning and selling painted eggs and illustrations, and I can keep Don busy and paid for a little while doing some much-needed painting inside our house. Stephanie and Karel probably have secure jobs at the hospital. But it’s very day-to-day around here. Not a bad way to be for awhile. But if it lasts a long time, which I firmly believe this depression will do, we’re going to have to get very creative to hold the farm together. Maybe that’s not bad either. Break up some of our old lazy patterns and get some entrepreneurism going.
Sylvia’s mother, Joyce Long, gave us a special Christmas present, a videotape of all the footage she has shot during her frequent visits to the farm over the past two years. The star of the show, of course, is Heather, her granddaughter, and it’s fun to see and remember when this verbal and active kid was barely walking and speaking only a few words. I was struck as I watched the tape with how idyllic our life looks. Joyce has been here for snowfalls and spring lambs, for hay harvest and bee swarming, for birthday parties and Thanksgiving feasts. She’s captured on tape Binky selling vegetables at the farmers’ market, Heather playing in glorious fall leaves, Basil chanting his nightly “Om” to the sunset on his favorite west-sloping hillside, the geese swimming in the pond, Sylvia riding her horse in the Fourth of July parade, Sylvia and me splitting wood, Don on the tractor — and much more.
As I watched and all those memories came back, I had to say to myself, wow, it really IS idyllic! What a beautiful place! What a wonderful way to live! How come I spend so much time worrying about the leak in the basement and the weeds in the rock garden and the fertility of the pasture and the property tax, instead of soaking in all the beauty and the easy companionship of the good people who live here?
Well, because I’m human, I guess, and humans can only let in the experience of heaven a little at a time. And because if someone didn’t worry about the leaks and weeds, the place wouldn’t be idyllic for very long. Nature has appointed me a worrier. I might as well play that role well.
And I do appreciate the beauty. Last Sunday skiing in the sparkling woods I was in rapture. The house is full of flowers at the moment, and I go from room to room sticking my nose in them. I am a plant-magnet; wherever I go I find house-plants, and then I propagate them and make even more. Some I get tired of, and I give them away or throw them out. The ones that stay are almost all winter-flowerers, because I need them in our long winters. So our three Christmas cactuses have just stopped flowering, our two cyclamens are in full bloom, two azaleas are just going by, two more are at their peak, and another is in bud, and there are narcissus and hyacinths in all stages of sprouting, bud, and bloom. Someday when I’m rich and idle I’m going to have a greenhouse and play in the dirt with green things all day. Probably in another lifetime.
The seed packets are coming in, so I can arrange them into categories and picture the absolutely perfect garden I will have this year. Yesterday, having vented my spleen on the pantry, I chose the basement for the next clean-up, a place that is such a monumental demonstration of the law of entropy that it will keep me busy for the rest of the winter. I started with the corner where the garden stuff is, to be sure that it’s all ready for me to start planting indoor seeds, in about a month.
Sylvia has produced two farm portraits for you this month. One is of Baby Faith, who is as goatlike and independent as her mother, jumping over the farmyard gate. Sylvia’s book on Mama Faith is nearing completion. The other picture is of the daily standoff between the largest goose, Cleopatra, and the smallest duck, the mallard, over who gets to swim in the “winter pond,” the rubber tub that Sylvia fills faithfully for them every morning — and usually several times again during the day.
The new pullets are laying two dozen beautiful brown eggs a day. We just ordered Murray McMurray’s “surprise package,” 25 assorted chicks of at least five different breeds, plus some Dark Cornish meat birds. Sylvia and Heather saw a red fox yesterday with a huge puffy tail. While Sylvia and I were loading wood yesterday, Simon and Critterbits chased each other up and down trees, matching gray cats playing in the white snow. I pulled rhubarb out of the freezer to cook, and I have split peas soaking for a soup. Stephanie and Karel are making serious inroads into our successful popcorn crop.
It’s strange to be living in a little piece of heaven while there’s a war going on.
Love, Dana
